English Summary: Julio Cortazar's preoccupation with the musicality of language celebrates the paradox of its intent to construct and convey meaning and its inability to be equated with actual human experience. His works expand traditional boundaries associated with the narrative form by encompassing characteristics typical of various forms of communication other than literary, which he engages for the purpose of seeking authenticity in all and every aspect of human existence. Rayuela, like a jazz musician's improvisation, is Cortazar's testimony; although not explicitly autobiographical, its fluidity and lack of constructed pretension allow for a direct bridge of communication between author, narrative, and reader akin to the experience of jazz performance. Like a musical improvisation, Rayuela juxtaposes the serious elements of structure and logical sequencing with a playful, intuitive imagination that succeeds in catapulting the reader into new worlds which, like an individual improvised solo, is never repeated in exactly the same way. Subject s :.

I was almost four when my family was able to return to Argentina. I spoke mainly French and from that language I retained my rolling r which I could never get rid of.

And so on. And poetry inspired by Poe, of course. When I was twelve, fourteen, I wrote love poems to a girl in my class I never took anything to a publisher.

And that was where I started to write stories, though I never dreamed of publishing them. A bit later I moved West, to Mendoza, to the University of Cuyo, where I was offered to teach some courses, this time at the university level.

I found work in Buenos Aires and there I went on writing stories. But I was very doubtful about having a book published. In that sense I think I was always clear-sighted. I knew that at a certain moment what I was writing was worth quite a bit more than what was being written by others of my age in Argentina. This is, so far, the earliest evidence of his writings and the only book he never allowed to be reprinted. His problem was not a poetic problem but one posed by an ambitious human realization, to which end the Poem should he the key.

As much as he displays profuse and at times cryptic language and handles the sonnet form with the skill of a virtuoso, this poetry is still the probing of a poet attitudinizing, echoing the prestige and elegance of a polished dictionary, conjuring the spell of the old masters. I believe that what happened to me was happening to many young writers.

I felt compelled to prove that I knew many rare words and that I knew how to combine them in a surprising way. The year, When I was the editor of a magazine named Los anales de Buenos Aires, I remember a tall young man presenting himself in the office and handing me a manuscript.

I said I would read it, and he came back after a week. I told him it was excellent; my sister Norah illustrated it. The book was published at the insistence of a few close friends who read the stories in manuscript form. I am referring, for example, to some of the stories of Bestiario. I knew nobody had written stories like those before in Spanish, at least in my country.

There were others, the admirable tales by Borges, for instance, but what I was doing was different. There are some stories whose subjects bring to mind those of Borges, sort of variations on a same theme; but even when that is the case, the common subject only underlines the differences.

Both stories deal with a similar character the compadre as the city counterpart in courage and sense of honor to the gaucho in the countryside , both present a similar plot an infamous act that must be avenged , and both surprise the reader with an unexpected turn in the sequence of events leading to their denouement.

He himself has pointed out that What is told in a story should indicate by itself who is speaking, at what distance, from what perspective and according to what type of discourse. The truth is that neither of them has much in common with the nineteenth-century European and American writers who, between and , produced the masterpieces of the fantastic genre. Borges has said that everything that has happened to him is illusory and that the only thing real in his life is a library.

We have dreamed it strong, mysterious, visible, ubiquitous in space and secure in time; but we have allowed tenuous, eternal interstices of unreason in its structure so we may know that it is false. Hence the countless references in his stories to authors and books, to theories and doctrines; hence the aura of the bookishness and intellection that pervades his work; and hence his constant insistence on his having said nothing new, because what he wrote was already written in other literatures.

The ingredients do not change, just as the number of colored glass bits contained in a kaleidoscope is always the same, but with each movement of the tube the symmetrical image does change. Borges deals with human culture as if he were holding a kaleidoscope, but after his master stroke the image is no longer the same. How to transform oneself if one continues to use the same language Plato used? They were right, as any poet knows, but that was just a moment in the complicated peeling of the banana.

Result, more than one of them ate it with the skin still on. The surrealists hung from words instead of brutally disengaging 12 Jaime Alazraki themselves from them, as Morelli would like to do from the word itself. Language means residence in reality, living in a reality. We have to relive it, not reanimate it.

He believes in a kind of marvelous reality here again the affinity with surrealism is obvious. Yet, due to a long series of mistakes, it has remained concealed under a reality prefabricated by many centuries of culture, a culture in which there are great achievements but also profound aberrations, profound distortions.

In a sense, man made a mistake when he invented time. I went to see them in the aquarium at the Jardin des Plantes and stayed for hours watching them, observing their immobility, their faint movements. Now I am an axolotl. They have no difficulty in moving with the same freedom and ease in both. This unbiased approach is in itself a profession of faith. The unstated assumption declares that the fantastic level is just as real or unreal, from a realist standpoint as the realist level.

If one of them produces in us a surreal 14 Jaime Alazraki or fantastic feeling, it is because in our daily lives we follow logical notions similar to those that govern the realist mode. The neofantastic writer, on the other hand, ignores these distinctions and approaches both levels with the same sense of reality. But there is nothing fragile in the texture of any of his stories. Quite the contrary. He also believes that with this change he moves to a new stage in his development as a writer.

The Atrium

Fantasy for its own sake had stopped interesting me. By then I was fully aware of the dangerous perfection of the storyteller who reaches a certain level of achievement and stays on that same level forever, without moving on.

I was a bit sick and tired of seeing how well my stories turned out.

And looking at myself meant looking at my neighbor, at man. Hopscotch traces the mandala through which the characters of the stories are constantly journeying. Hopscotch seeks to understand those forces, and as such it represents the intellectual bow from which the stories were shot. His tales were fantastic responses to those problems and questions which occupied his mind at the time and which eventually found a masterful formulation in Hopscotch. In the hand, in the newspaper, in time, in the air: everything full of holes, everything spongy, like a colander straining itself Nothing, a crack What is behind that door is a world that Johnny sees only on one occasion, through his music, but whose substance one glimpses throughout the narrative.

A good example is the biography of Johnny written by Bruno: very well informed, very complete, very successful, but with one omission— the biographee.

Index of /Libros/Cortazar

But Bruno, In this sense, Hopscotch is a devastating criticism of rationalism How does one get there? These seemingly preposterous situations impress us as a absurd because they run against the grain of our accepted order, which for Oliveira has become absurdity at its Toward the Last Square of the Hopscotch 19 best.

For him, reason contains a sophism as huge as the world it has created, and logic leads to a gargantuan and catastrophic nowhere. And although Hopscotch presents no answers, no prescriptions for guaranteed salvation it offers a possibility of reconciliation. Ovejero and Ferraguto, Hence psychology is no longer the yardstick. What replaces psychology as the criterion to measure human behavior? The notions of time and space as traditionally accepted are no longer the ordinate and the abscissa which frame and regulate life.

In 62 the action takes place in Paris, London and Vienna, but the characters move and act in these different cities as if they were one single space referred to as la ciudad the city. But they ignore the rules of the game they play. That past becomes present, and the present in which the characters reside sends them back to that legendary past, in which context one begins to understand in part the patterns that shape their destiny. In form, the novel is built with the precision and cleverness of a clockwork.

In this sense, the overture is like a cocoon which already holds the full length of the thread the text patiently and skillfully unwinds. His next and latest novel so far, Libro de Manuel, is an effort to show that a writer can undertake to deal with the social problems of his time without turning into a puppeteer whose script has been set beforehand as an adaptation of political slogans and ideological platitudes.